Communication systems are known to transport large amounts of data between a plurality of end user devices, which, for example, include telephones, facsimile machines, computers, television sets, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants, etc. As is also known, such communication systems may be local area networks (LANs) and/or wide area networks (WANs) that are stand-alone communication systems or interconnected to other LANs and/or WANs as part of a public switched telephone network (PSTN), packet switched data network (PSDN), integrated service digital network (ISDN), the Internet, etc. As is further known, communication systems include a plurality of system equipment to facilitate the transporting of data. Such system equipment includes, but is not limited to, routers, switches, bridges, gateways, protocol converters, frame relays, private branch exchanges, etc.
The transportation of data within communication systems is typically governed by one or more standards that ensure the integrity of data conveyances and fairness of access for data conveyances. For example, there are a variety of Ethernet standards that govern serial transmissions within a communication system at data rates of 10 megabits per second, 100 megabits per second, 1 gigabit per second and beyond. Another standard, which is for fiber optic data conveyances, is Synchronous Optical NETwork (SONET) that provides various high data rate protocols, including one for 10 gigabits per second. In accordance with such standards, many system components and end user devices of a communication system transport data via serial transmission paths. Internally, however, the system components and end user devices process data in a parallel manner. As such, each system component and end user device must receive the serial data and convert the serial data into parallel data without loss of information.
Accurate recovery of information from high-speed serial transmissions typically requires transceiver components to operate at clock rates that are equal to or higher than the rate of the received serial data, which, for today's high-speed systems, requires very high clock rates. Such high clock rates limit the usefulness of prior art clock and data recovery circuits since such clock and data recovery circuits require precise alignment of the received serial data with the high-speed clock to recover an embedded clock signal in the data stream and/or to recover the data, which is difficult to achieve using today's integrated circuit fabrication techniques. In addition, the high-speed serial data requires the clock and data recovery circuits to have a bandwidth wide enough to handle the high-speed serial data, which is also difficult to achieve using today's integrated circuit fabrication techniques.
As the demand for data throughput increases, so do the demands for precision high-speed serial transceivers (i.e., a transmitter and a receiver, where the receiver includes a clock and data recovery circuit). The increased throughput demands are pushing some current integrated circuit manufacturing processes to their operating limits, where integrated circuit processing limits (e.g., device parasitics, trace sizes, propagation delays, device sizes, etc.) and integrated circuit (IC) fabrication limits (e.g., IC layout, frequency response of the packaging, frequency response of bonding wires, etc.) limit the speed at which the high-speed serial transceiver, and particularly the clock and data recovery circuit, may operate without excessive jitter and/or noise.
A further alternative for high-speed serial transceivers is to use an IC technology that inherently provides for greater speeds. For instance, switching from a CMOS process to a silicon germanium or gallium arsenide process would allow integrated circuit transceivers to operate at greater speeds, but at substantially increased manufacturing costs. Currently, for most commercial-grade applications, including communication systems, such alternate integrated circuit fabrication processes are too cost prohibitive for wide spread use. In additional to the cost of these alternative IC fabrication processes, they do not lend themselves well to large-scale integration, especially when compared to CMOS IC fabrication processes.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus that can accurately recover data and a clock signal from received high-speed serial transmissions.